If we’re still in contact with Voyager, I did not know. I’m ashamed to wonder if it’s past the Oort Cloud. If we’re still in contact, I stand corrected. Dr. Coyote might argue it, though. Some of this was a result of conversation, not just my opinion alone.

I think just about anything can fly (not literally!) with the alien question. But I’d want humans to be a little more evolved before dealing with aliens. But that’s just me. I like meeting people on equal ground, not as a fan, not as fans, so to speak.

As far as “almost” die outs, the Cambrian extinction and the asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs come to mind. It would only take something really trivial to wipe out humans. There is some speculation that a large moon is necessary to stabilize the climate. But maybe a world could evolve independent of stability? As I said, with speculation of alien life, all is possible. I still think communication would be more involved than most people would ever imagine, even with math as a common ground.

THANK YOU FOR THE INTERESTING POSTS!

@Anne/Mom:
I’m pretty sure the Voyager spacecraft is well beyond Neptune and still in radio contact with the Earth.

I’m also not familiar with the theory that life has re-emerged several times on earth. It was my understanding that stromatolite fossils put the origin of life sometime within the first billion years of Earth’s existence, and the consensus is that it’s been continuous since then. I’m also not aware of any disasters that brought life close to ending completely, but I’m probably just ignorant there.

In my post I tried to mention that low values of fl and fi in the Drake equation don’t really impact the Fermi paradox because of the tenacity of self-replicating space-probes. This means that whether a big moon is required for life, or intelligent life isn’t really an issue.

@Mike:
I have absolutely no idea what multiverse frame-dragging would look like, much less how it applies to the conversation. The stuff you’re going into seems to me to be fringe enough that you’ll have to elaborate much more before I’ll be able to relate it to the topic. (I’m not sure how to interpret your time-travel example either. It seems to me that to “alter the timeline” is paradoxical.)

More generally:

@Mike:
I’m afraid I haven’t read any Strieber or Egan, so forgive my ignorance here. Why would a civilization value novelty over everything else? And more importantly, why would such a society be interested in other planets if they could just make their own aliens using random seeds? What keeps them from “evolving”? And do you mean “evolve” in the biological sense or in the sense of progress?

With regard to whether there are “more issues than a simple threat/benefit profile” at work for modeling alien motivations, I assume that civilizations/beings capable of spaceflight are rational. By “rational” I mean their actions are always made with the intention of furthering their goals.

To the best of my knowledge, humans don’t actually have an intrinsic goal to visit other worlds, but they do have a goal to explore and perhaps even conquer. This seems likely to be the case for any evolved intelligence, as well. Now, in a post-singularity, if your goal is to explore, why go off-world? Why not just simulate other planets and get lost in endless games?

One could argue that people like the “real thing”, but I’d bet a super-intelligent machine built to protect people would almost certainly talk such an individual out of generating such a huge existential risk.

Now, I admit that there is a possibility that an artificial intelligence could be given a core goal that involved contacting aliens, but out of all the possible goals this one seems very small. Even a superintelligence that emerged from a SETI-like program wouldn’t want to contact aliens (only locate and monitor them).

If there is no core goal of extra-planetary contact and the being is rational, I fail to see how a comparison of potential power benefit with risk is an oversimplification.

@Anne/Mom:
I’m not really sure why aliens would want to look at Saturn or contact humans only after a specific ethical threshold. Both of these ideas seem like the result of anthropomorphic bias.

I may be off in thinking that we could see alien beacons, but I guess I just assume that an advanced civilization interested in contacting others could propagate Von Neumann probes and we’d be able to see one sitting at the edge of the solar system if this were the case.

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THANK YOU BOTH FOR THE THOUGHT OUT REPLIES! ^_^

The only way to signal that it could be seen from far away would be to mess with Sol. Astronomers usually look for changes in the stellar field.

We could look at variable stars. FM or AM patterns would certainly indicate something, possibly intelligent.

Why are variable stars different according to where they are in the sky? Could it be deliberate? Rather than look at thousands of star maps, why not put down navigation beacons around the galaxy. Quasars might be the equivalent of GPS.

Cool thoughts. It’s fun to think about….

Well, there are many problems, but the biggest one is that no one at NASA has been able to keep radio contact with probes beyond Neptune. The New Horizons Pluto probe should get there in about ten years, so we’ll see if they can keep contact with it.

While I appreciate what Sagan said about aliens, I’m not sure that they would want to contact the humans until the humans can show a little more, well, humanity. I also seriously, seriously doubt in our ability to communicate with such, should they be able to contact us (since we can’t contact them.)

There are also some questions that you miss. Does intelligent life require a stable large moon in orbit? Since life has evolved and been wiped out several times, one must take into consideration that, since life getting almost totally wiped out has happened several times here. That would slow or speed up the evolution of intelligence on another planet. Does that life have any interest in the stars or can they see the stars at all? For many many years no one could see the stars on this planet because of cloud cover and continual rain.

The distances are damning and I’m not sure a post-singularity species would find humans interesting enough to interact with them. I could see aliens coming to Sol’s system to look at Saturn.

But it’s fun to speculate, of course. It is better for us to do so because it helps humans with themselves. Watching Avatar is about ourselves and a good opportunity for some hard questions.

hugs
me

Any inquiry into the motivations of advanced (immortal) civilizations and entities will have to consider more issues than a simple threat/benefit profile. Greg Egan has a lot to say about this in his SF books, which can get pretty overwhelming.

Suppose that the emergence of a conscious human race causes a observational impact on quantum events so that it results in a frame-dragging effect in a “many worlds” universe, such that our emergence changes the constraints of reality.

If, for example, previous conscious civilizations discovered how to travel backward in time and change the past, they would continue to do this (in all likelihood) until their alterations to the timeline resulted in editing the universe into a state where time travel into the past (and probably into the future) was impossible. The emergence of a new consciousness reopening such possibilities would create uncertainty for all of the other conscious entities riding on the same spacetime vector. See what I mean?